Social Question

How do employers get to the stuff you've posted on Facebook?

I know plenty of people who applied for jobs with the state (police, social work, etc) and deleted their facebook pages until they were hired (or not), because they didn’t want anyone getting to their information.

I’ve heard from a lot of people that employers will sometimes look at your facebook page and review the content before making a decision about hiring you.

My question is, if you have all of your content set to be viewed only by confirmed friends, how do they get to this information?

12 Answers

with regards to police and social work they can see photos that you have been tagged in on peoples profiles that may not be kept private. especially if you are in the police if you are tagged in a photo with say the rest of your family people can link you into other profiles that may not be so secure. It probably wouldnt make a difference so much in getting a job but my uncle wont get a facebook incase the criminals he deals with gets to see what his wife/kids look like. he just donsnt want to put them at any risk as he is pretty high up in a foreign police force. When trying to get jobs it probably wouldnt matter so much but I would probably delete my facebook, its not worth the risk. Also with the new iphone facial recognition technology if there is one photo of you tagged under your name on the internet the software can bring up all information openly available on that person just from taking a photo with your iphone.
They cant access the information on your own profile if it is private but i know i have got people on my facebook who are promoters of nights and not my friends. I dont put any information of any use on my facebook other than my name, date of birth and my junk email address. i check it from time to time to delete everything in there so people can get hold of me if they really need and cant through fb.

Facebook has 50 privacy settings with 170 privacy options and by default is set to share everything with everybody. Are you absolutely sure you have set it up so that it keeps your personal information private?

@Lightlyseared I’ve gone through a couple of walkthroughs on how to make your profile secure with facebook’s new security settings… the only thing I didn’t edit was the part on what information applications can share, because I’m not quite sure what it means. I play a few games on facebook, so I don’t want to change any settings that won’t allow the games to function right.

I would assume that most law enforcement agencies (and probably many corporations) have computer whizzes on staff who could hack into FB privacy settings with little difficulty.

Legally? Not sure. But if they’re using the info as part of evaluating you for a position, they wouldn’t be stupid enough to let you know about it. If they found something they didn’t like and turned you down they could use any pretense they want and you would be none the wiser.

There are services that will seek out information on prospective employees for employers. Social networking information. At least this is what they claim. I happened upon one of these sites, don’t know where or what I was looking for at the time. But it was interesting.